Migrant Rights

I push a partially shattered glass door of an incongruous looking office and walk past a group of Latino and African American men into the offices of the San Francisco Day Labor Program (SF-DLP) in the Mission district. It is a slightly chilly morning but that doesn’t deter the workers awaiting a job assignment from taking a break outdoors. Inside, rows of half-occupied chairs—like those seen in hospital waiting rooms—accost my eyes. The workers mill about, chat, read the newspaper, and one of them, Leon, reads the popular Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita. The spiritual detachment propounded in the Gita helps him overcome the despair of waiting, he claims. It is a long wait alright—barely 10 per cent of the waiting work force will work that day.

I
believe that popular education starts from personal experience and
builds a deliberate intentionality about trying to help people look at
the conditions and issues they are dealing with on changing things and
making things better.

I first heard about popular education
when I was doing HIV prevention work in San Francisco with immigrant
women. I started learning about some of the models that had been used
in Latin America with immigrant communities, like the promotora de
salud model. The premise of promotora de salud was that people in the
community were the best messengers to other folks in the community.
That was my introduction to popular education as a tool to help
individuals learn and as a method of empowering and organizing
communities.

At the South Asian Network (SAN) we work with youth and older South Asian people to engage them in dialogues on racism, violence within the family, and immigration. We look at how policies on these issues impact the community. The question is, how do we do that so that the community feels a sense of entitlement and ownership?

Popular education works with immigrant and refugee community leaders because it is something they can relate to based on cultural and historical background. It’s a style that we know as indigenous cultures, for example, myself as a Somali refugee. It’s based on people sharing knowledge and having open space to solve and create space where people work together. So it’s part of our culture even though we may not have the same words for it.

Immigration is once again at the center of national debate, deemed a major threat to U.S. national security after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Capitalizing on the 911 1 backlash, the anti-immigrant movement rapidly added terrorism to its list of social and economic ills to blame on immigrants, reviving longstanding arguments against immigration. Fueled by the economic slump, the 9/11 anti-immigrant hysteria now threatens to devour the civil and human rights of immigrants and non-immigrants alike, giving new life to unbridled calls for racially restrictive measures. This volatile situation presents the immigrant rights movement with tough challenges and opportunities that put the defense of the rights of immigrants at the center of the demands for social, environmental, economic and racial justice.

In 1998, 48-year-old Parvathi Ammal came to Cupertino, California from Madurai, India, to visit her distant but well-to-do relatives on their invitation. During her originally planned three-month stay, she helped the Gopalan family with household chores, including taking care of their two children and occasional cooking. At the end of her stay, the family invited her to continue living with them as a domestic help for a monthly payment of $300, convincing her that working informally and overstaying her visitor visa, were not crimes.

An interview with Sheila Bapat
“The roots of domestic work are deeply connected to the history of slavery in the U.S. It’s no accident that a vast majority of domestic workers were African American women to begin with, and increasingly now, immigrant women of color.”

“We have women power, people power, but we don’t have paper power.” Gulnahar Alam
“Unfortunately, the way the non-profit system is set up is that it does not affirm working class leadership, and I think that’s something that we have to really think about and reflect upon.”
Yalini Dream

"Gender constructions themselves are racialized. Our overarching notion of what is a good man and what is a good woman, are based on white people being good people and people of color being bad people."

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